Revival

VII

My father died in 2003, having outlived his wife and two of his five children. Claire Morton Overton wasn’t yet thirty when her estranged husband took her life. Both my mother and my eldest brother died at the age of fifty-one.

Question: Death, where is thy sting?

Answer: Every-fucking-where.

I went home to Harlow for Dad’s memorial service. Most of the roads were paved now, not just ours and Route 9. There was a housing development where we used to go swimming, and a Big Apple convenience store half a mile from Shiloh Church. Yet the town was in many essential ways the same. Our church still stood just down the road from Myra Harrington’s house (although Me-Maw herself had gone to that great party line in the sky), and the tire swing still hung from the tree in our backyard. I suppose Terry’s children had used it, although they’d all be too old for such things now; the rope was frayed and dark with age.

Maybe I’ll replace that, I thought… but why? For whom? Not my children, certainly, for I had none, and this place was no longer my place.

The only car in the driveway was a battered ’51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible—Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race. Yet there was the Delco Batteries sticker on the trunk, and the number 19 on the side, in paint as red as blood. A crow came down and roosted on the hood. I remembered how our dad had taught all us kids to poke the sign of the evil eye at crows (Nothing in it, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure, he said), and I thought: I don’t like this. Something is wrong here.

I could understand Con not having arrived, Hawaii was a lot farther away than Colorado, but where was Terry? He and his wife, Annabelle, still lived here. And what about the Bowies? The Clukeys? The Paquettes? The DeWitts? What about the crew from Morton Fuel Oil? Dad had been getting up there, but surely he hadn’t outlived all of the home folks.

I parked, got out of my car, and saw it was no longer the Ford Focus I’d driven off the Hertz lot in Portland. It was the ’66 Galaxie my father and brother had given me for my seventeenth birthday. On the passenger seat was the set of hardbound Kenneth Roberts novels my mother had given me: Oliver Wiswell and Arundel and all the rest.

This is a dream, I thought. It’s one I’ve had before.

There was no relief in the realization, only increased dread.

A crow landed on the roof of the house I’d grown up in. Another alighted on the branch supporting the tire swing, the one with all the bark rubbed off so it stuck out like a bone.

I didn’t want to go in the house, because I knew what I’d find there. My feet carried me forward, nonetheless. I mounted the steps, and although Terry had sent me a photo of the rebuilt porch eight years before (or maybe it was ten), the same old board, second from the top, gave out the same old ill-tempered squawk when I stepped on it.

They were waiting for me in the dining room. Not the whole family; just the dead ones. My mother was little more than a mummy, as she had been as she lay dying during that cold February. My father was pale and wizened, much as he’d appeared in the Christmas card photo Terry had sent me not long before his final heart attack. Andy was corpulent—my skinny brother had put on a great deal of meat in middle age—but his hypertensive flush had faded to the waxy pallor of the grave. Claire was the worst. Her crazed ex-husband hadn’t been content just to kill her; she’d had the temerity to leave him, and only complete obliteration would do. He shot her in the face three times, the last two as she lay dead on her classroom floor, before putting a bullet in his own brain.

“Andy,” I said. “What happened to you?”

“Prostate,” he said. “I should have listened, baby brother.”

Sitting on the table was mold-covered birthday cake. As I watched, the frosting humped up, broke apart, and a black ant the size of a pepper-shaker crawled out. It trundled up my dead brother’s arm, across his shoulder, and then onto his face. My mother turned her head. I could hear the dry tendons creak, the sound like a rusty spring holding an old kitchen door.

“Happy birthday, Jamie,” she said. Her voice was grating, expressionless.

“Happy birthday, Son.” My dad.

“Happy birthday, kiddo.” Andy.

Then Claire turned to look at me, although she had only a single raw socket to look out of. Don’t speak, I thought. If you speak, it will drive me insane.

But she did, the words coming from a clotted hole filled with broken teeth.

“Don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car.”

And my mother nodding like a ventriloquist’s dummy while more huge ants crawled out of the ancient cake.

I tried to cover my eyes, but my hands were too heavy. They hung limply at my sides. Behind me, I heard that porch board give out its ill-tempered squeal. Not once but twice. Two new arrivals, and I knew who they were.

“No,” I said. “No more. Please, no more.”

But then Patsy Jacobs’s hand fell on my shoulder, and those of Tag-Along-Morrie circled my leg just above the knee.

“Something happened,” Patsy said in my ear. Hair tickled my cheek, and I knew it was hanging from her scalp, torn off her head in the crash.

“Something happened,” Morrie agreed, hugging my leg tighter.

Then they all began to sing. The tune was “Happy Birthday,” but the lyrics had changed.

“Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened, dear Jamie, something happened TO YOU!”

That was when I began to scream.

I had this dream for the first time on the train that took me to Denver, although—fortunately for the people riding in the same car with me—my screams emerged in the real world as a series of guttural grunts deep in my throat. Over the next twenty years I had it perhaps two dozen times. I always awoke with the same panic-stricken thought: Something happened.

At that time, Andy was still alive and well. I began calling him and telling him to get his prostate checked. At first he just laughed at me, then he grew annoyed, pointing out that our father was still as healthy as a horse, and looked good to go for another twenty years or so.

“Maybe,” I told him, “but Mom died of cancer, and she died young. So did her mom.”

“In case you didn’t notice, neither of them had a prostate.”

“I don’t think that matters to the gods of heredity,” I said. “They just send the Big C wherever it’s most welcome. For Christ’s sake, what’s the big deal? It’s a finger up your ass, it’s over in ten seconds, and as long as you don’t feel both of the doctor’s hands on your shoulders, you don’t even have to worry about your backdoor virginity.”

“I’ll get it done when I’m fifty,” he said. “That’s the recommendation, that’s what I’m going to do, and that’s the end of it. I’m glad you cleaned up your act, Jamie. I’m glad you’re holding down what passes for a grownup job in the music business. But none of that gives you the right to oversee my life. God does that for me.”

Fifty will be too late, I thought. By the time you’re fifty, it will already have taken hold.

Because I loved my brother (even though he had in my humble opinion grown up to become a moderately annoying God-botherer), I made an end run and went to Francine, his wife. To her I could say what I knew Andy would scoff at—I’d had a premonition, and it was a strong one. Please, Francie, please have him get that prostate exam.

He compromised (“Just to shut you both up”) by getting a PSA screening shortly after his forty-seventh birthday, grumbling that the damn test was unreliable. Perhaps, but it was hard for even my scripture-quoting, doctorphobic brother to argue with the result: a perfect Bo Derek ten. A trip to a Lewiston urologist followed, then an operation. He was pronounced cancer-free three years later. A year after that—at fifty-one—he suffered a stroke while watering the lawn, and was in the arms of Jesus before the ambulance got him to the hospital. This was in upstate New York, where the funeral was held. There was no memorial service in Harlow. I was glad. I went home all too often in my dreams, which were a long-term result of Jacobs’s treatment for drug addiction. Of that I had no doubt.

I awoke from this dream again on a bright Monday in June of 2008, and lay in bed for ten minutes, getting myself under control. My breathing eventually slowed, and I got past the idea that if I opened my mouth, nothing would come out except Something happened, over and over again. I reminded myself that I was clean and sober, and that was still the biggest thing in my life, the thing which had changed that life for the better. The dream came less often now, and it had been at least four years since I had awakened to find myself poking at my skin (the last time with a spatula, which had done zero damage). It’s no worse than a small surgical scar, I told myself, and usually I could think of it that way. It was only in the immediate aftermath that I felt something lurking behind the dream, something malevolent. And female. I was sure of that, even then.

By the time I was showered and dressed, the dream had receded to a faint mist. Soon it would burn off entirely. I knew this from experience.

I had a second-floor apartment on Boulder Canyon Drive in Nederland. By 2008 I could have afforded a house, but it would have meant a mortgage, and I didn’t want that. Being single, the apartment did me fine. The bed was a queen, like the one in Jacobs’s boondocker, and there had been no shortage of princesses to share it with me over the years. They were fewer and farther between these days, but that was to be expected, I supposed. I would soon turn fifty-two, the age, give or take a few years, when smooth Lotharios begin their inevitable transformation into shaggy old goats.

Besides, I liked to see my savings account slowly fatten. I wasn’t a miser by any means, but money was not an unimportant consideration to me, either. The memory of waking up in the Fairgrounds Inn, sick and broke, had never left me. Nor had the face of the red-haired country girl when she handed back my maxed-out credit card. Try the card again, I’d told her. Honey, she had replied, I look at you and I don’t have to.

Yeah, but look at me now, sweetbritches, I thought as I drove my 4Runner west on Caribou Road. I had added forty pounds since the night I met Charles Jacobs in Tulsa, but at six-one, a hundred and ninety looked good on me. Okay, so my belly wasn’t quite flat, and my last cholesterol count had been iffy, but back then I’d looked like a Dachau survivor. I wasn’t ever going to play Carnegie Hall, or arenas with the E Street Band, but I did still play—plenty—and had work I liked and was good at. If a man or woman wants more, I often told myself, that man or woman is tempting the gods. So don’t tempt them, Jamie. And if you should happen to hear Peggy Lee singing that rueful old Leiber and Stoller classic—“Is That All There Is?”—change the station and get some good old stompin music.

Four miles along Caribou Road, just as it starts to climb more steeply into the mountains, I turned off at the sign reading WOLFJAW RANCH, 2 MILES. I punched my code into the gate keypad and parked in the gravel lot marked EMPLOYEES AND TALENT. The only time I’d seen that lot full was when Rihanna recorded an EP at Wolfjaw. And that day there were more cars parked on the access road, almost down to the gate. The chick had a serious entourage.

Pagan Starshine (real name: Hillary Katz) would have fed the horses two hours ago, but I went down the double line of stalls anyway, giving them apple slices and pieces of carrots. Most were big and beautiful—I sometimes thought of them as Cadillac limos on four feet. My favorite, however, was more of a beat-up Chevrolet. Bartleby, a dapple gray with no bloodline to speak of, had been at Wolfjaw when I arrived with nothing but a guitar, a duffel bag, and a bad case of nerves, and he hadn’t been young then. Most of his teeth had gone the way of the blue suede shoe years ago, but he chewed his apple slice with the few he had left, jaws ruminating lazily from side to side. His mild dark eyes never left my face.

“You good business, Bart,” I said, stroking his muzzle. “And I just love good business.”

He nodded as if to say he knew it.

Pagan Starshine—Paig, to her friends—was feeding the chickens out of her apron. She couldn’t wave, so she gave me a big rusty halloo, followed by the first two lines of “Mashed Potato Time.” I joined her on the next two: it’s the latest, it’s the greatest, etc., etc. Pagan used to sing backup, and when she was in her prime, she sounded like one of the Pointer Sisters. She also smoked like a chimney, and by the age of forty, she sounded more like Joe Cocker at Woodstock.

Studio 1 was closed and dark. I lit it up and checked the bulletin board for that day’s sessions. There were four: one at ten, one at two, one at six, and one at nine that would probably go on until past midnight. Studio 2 would be just as stacked. Nederland is a tiny burg nestled up on the Western Slope where the air is rare—less than fifteen hundred full-time residents—but it has a vital musical presence out of all proportion to its size; the bumper stickers reading NEDERLAND! WHERE NASHVILLE GETS HIGH! aren’t a total exaggeration. Joe Walsh recorded his first album in Wolfjaw 1, when Hugh Yates’s father ran the place, and John Denver recorded his last in Wolfjaw 2. Hugh once played me outtakes of Denver talking to his band about an experimental plane he’d just bought, something called a Long-EZ. Listening to it gave me the creeps.

There were nine downtown bars where you could hear live music any night of the week, and three recording operations besides ours. Wolfjaw Ranch was the biggest and best, though. On the day I stepped timidly into Hugh’s office and told him Charles Jacobs had sent me, there were at least two dozen pictures on his walls, including Eddie Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Axl Rose (in his prime), and U2. Yet the one he was proudest of—and the only one he was in himself—was of the Staple Singers. “Mavis Staples is a goddess,” he told me. “The best woman singer in America. No one else even comes close.”

I had recorded on my share of cheap singles and bad indie albums during my dues-paying years on the road, but never heard myself on a major label until I filled in at a Neil Diamond session for a rhythm guitarist who had come down with mono. I was terrified that day—sure I would just lean over and puke on my SG—but since then I’d played on lots of sessions, mostly as a fill-in but sometimes by request. The money wasn’t great, but it was far from terrible. Weekends I played with the house band at a local bar called Comstock Lode, and had been known to filch gigs on the side in Denver. I also gave music lessons to aspiring high school players at a summer program Hugh inaugurated after his father died. It was called Rock-Atomic.

“I can’t do that,” I protested to Hugh when he suggested adding this to my duties. “I can’t read music!”

“You can’t read notes is what you mean,” he said. “You can read tablature just fine, and that’s all these kids want. Fortunately for us and them, it’s all most of them need. You ain’t going to find Segovia up here in the hills, my man.”

He was right about that, and once my fright wore off, I enjoyed the lessons. They brought back memories of Chrome Roses, for one thing. For another… maybe I should be ashamed to say this, but the pleasure I felt working with the Rock-Atomic teenagers was similar to the pleasure I got from feeding Bartleby his morning apple slice and stroking his nose. Those kids just wanted to rock, and most of them discovered they could… once they mastered a bar E, that was.

Studio 2 was also dark, but Mookie McDonald had left the soundboard on. I shut everything down and made a note to talk to him about it. He was a good board guy, but forty years of smoking rope had made him forgetful. My Gibson SG was propped up with the rest of the instruments, because later that day I was going to play on a demo with a local rockabilly combo called Gotta Wanna. I sat on a stool and played tennis-racket style for ten minutes or so, stuff like “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and “Got My Mojo Working,” just limbering up. I was better now than in my years on the road, much better, but I was still never going to be Clapton.

The phone rang—although in the studios, it didn’t actually ring, just lit up blue around the edges. I put my guitar down and answered it. “Studio Two, Curtis Mayfield speaking.”

“How’s the afterlife, Curtis?” Hugh Yates asked.

“Dark. The good side is that I’m no longer paralyzed.”

“Glad to hear it. Come on up here to the big house. I have something you should see.”

“Jeez, man, we’ve got somebody recording a half an hour from now. I think that c&w chick with the long legs.”

“Mookie will get her set up.”

“No, he won’t. He’s not here yet. Also, he left the board on in Two. Again.”

Hugh sighed. “I’ll talk to him. Just come on up.”

“Okay, but Hugh? I’ll talk to the Mookster. My job, right?”

He laughed. “I sometimes wonder what happened to the wouldn’t-say-shit-if-he-had-a-mouthful sad sack I hired,” he said. “Come on. This’ll blow your mind.”

The big house was a sprawling ranch with Hugh’s vintage Continental parked in the turnaround. The man was a fool for anything that slurped hi-test, and he could afford the indulgence. Although Wolfjaw did only a little better than break-even, there was a lot of elderly Yates family dough in blue chip investments, and Hugh—twice divorced, prenups in both, no children from either—was the last sprig on the Yates family tree. He kept horses, chickens, sheep, and a few pigs, but that was little more than a hobby. The same was true of his cars and collection of big-engine pickup trucks. What he cared about was music, and about that he cared deeply. He claimed to have once been a player himself, although I’d never seen him pick up a horn or a guitar.

“Music matters,” he told me once. “Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty years from now.”

It was easy enough to remember the day I met him, because Wolfjaw looked the same, right down to the midnight-blue Connie with the opera windows parked in front. Only I had changed. He met me at the door on that day in the fall of 1992, shook my hand, and showed me into his office. There he plopped into a high-backed chair behind a desk that looked big enough to land a Piper Cub on. I was nervous following him in; when I saw all those famous faces looking down from the walls, what little saliva remaining in my mouth dried up entirely.

He looked me up and down—a visitor wearing a dirty AC/DC tee and even dirtier jeans—and said, “Charlie Jacobs called me. I’ve owed the Rev a large favor for quite a few years now. It’s larger than I could ever repay, but he tells me you square it.”

I stood there in front of the desk, tongue-tied. I knew how to audition for a band, but this was something different.

“He said you used to be a doper.”

“Yes,” I said. No point denying it.

“He said it was Big H.”

“Yes.”

“But now you’re clean?”

“Yes.”

I thought he’d ask me for how long, but he didn’t. “Sit down, for God’s sake. You want a Coke? A beer? Lemonade? Iced tea, maybe?”

I sat, but couldn’t seem to relax against the back of my seat. “Iced tea sounds good.”

He used the intercom on his desk. “Georgia? Two iced teas, honey.” Then, to me: “This is a working ranch, Jamie, but the livestock I care about are the animals who show up with instruments.”

I tried a smile, but it made me feel moronic and I gave up on it.

He seemed not to notice. “Rock bands, country bands, solo artists. They’re our bread and butter, but we also do commercial jingles for the Denver radio stations and twenty or thirty recorded books each year. Michael Douglas recorded a Faulkner novel at Wolfjaw, and Georgia ’bout peed her pants. He’s got that easygoing public persona, but whoo, what a perfectionist in the studio.”

I couldn’t think of a reply to this, so kept silent and rooted for the iced tea. My mouth was as dry as a desert.

He leaned forward. “Do you know what every working ranch needs more than anything else?”

I shook my head, but before he could elucidate further, a pretty young black woman came in with two tall, ice-choked glasses of iced tea on a silver tray. There was a sprig of mint in each. I squeezed two lemon slices into my tea, but left the sugar bowl alone. During my heroin years I had been a bear for sugar, but since that day with the headphones in the auto body shop, any sweetness seemed cloying to me. I had bought a Hershey bar in the dining car shortly after leaving Tulsa, and found I couldn’t eat it. Just smelling it made me feel like gagging.

“Thank you, Georgia,” Yates said.

“Very welcome. Don’t forget visiting hours. They start at two and Les will be expecting you.”

“I’ll remember.” She went out, closing the door softly behind her, and he turned back to me. “What every working ranch needs is a foreman. The one who takes care of the ranching and farming side here at Wolfjaw is Rupert Hall. He’s fine and well, but my music foreman is recuperating in Boulder Community Hospital. Les Calloway. Don’t suppose the name means anything to you.”

I shook my head.

“What about the Excellent Board Brothers?”

That rang a bell. “Instrumental group, weren’t they? Surf sound, kind of like Dick Dale and His Del-Tones?”

“Yeah, that was them. Kind of weird, seeing as how they all hailed from Colorado, which is about as far from both oceans as you can get. Had one top forty hit—‘Aloona Ana Kaya.’ Which is very bad Hawaiian for ‘Let’s have sex.’”

“Sure, I remember that.” Of course I did; my sister played it about a billion times. “It’s the one with the girl laughing all the way through it.”

Yates grinned. “That laugh was their ticket to one-hit-wonderdom, and I’m the daddy-o who put it on the record. No more than an afterthought, really. This was when my father ran the place. And the girl who’s laughing her ass off also works here. Hillary Katz, although these days she calls herself Pagan Starshine. She’s sober now, but on that day she was so stoned on nitrous she couldn’t stop laughing. I recorded her right there in the booth—she had no idea. It made that record, and they cut her in for seven grand.”

I nodded. The annals of rock are full of similar lucky accidents.

“Anyway, the Excellent Board Brothers had one tour, then did the two brokes. You know those?”

I certainly did, and from personal experience. “Went broke and broke up.”

“Uh-huh. Les came home and went to work for me. He produces better than he ever played, and he’s been my chief ramrod on the music side for going on fifteen years now. When Charlie Jacobs called me, my idea was to make you Les’s understudy, thinking you could earn while you learn, play some gigs on the side, all the usual shit. That’s still the idea, but your learning curve better be goddam steep, son, because Les had a heart attack last week. He’s gonna be okay—so I’m told—but he’s got to lose a bunch of weight and take a bunch of pills and he’s talking about retiring in a year or so. Which will give me plenty of time to see if you’re gonna work out.”

I felt something close to panic. “Mr. Yates—”

“Hugh.”

“Hugh, I know next to nothing about A&R. The only recording studios I’ve ever been in are the ones where the group I was playing with paid for time by the hour.”

“Mostly with the lead guitarist’s doting parents footing the bill,” he said. “Or the drummer’s wife, waitressing eight hours a day and hustling tips on sore feet.”

Yes, that was pretty much how it went. Until wifey wised up, that was, and put him out of doors.

He leaned forward, hands clasped. “You’ll either learn or you won’t. The Rev says you will. That’s good enough for me. Got to be. I owe him. For now, all you have to do is light up the studios, keep track of AH—you know what that is, don’t you?”

“Artists’ hours.”

“Uh-huh, and lock up at night. I’ve got a guy who can show you the ropes until Les gets back. Mookie McDonald’s his name. If you pay as much attention to what Mookie does wrong as to what he does right, you’ll learn a lot. Don’t let him keep the log, whatever you do. And one more thing. If you smoke some rope, that’s your business as long as you show up for work on time and don’t start a grassfire. But if I hear you’re riding the pink horse again…”

I made myself look him in the eye. “I’m not going back to that.”

“A brave statement, and one I’ve heard many times, in a few cases from people who are now dead. Sometimes, though, it turns out to be true. I hope it will be in your case. But just so we’re clear: you use and you’re gone, favor owed or no favor owed. Are we clear on that?”

We were. Crystal.

Georgia Donlin was just as beautiful in 2008 as in 1992, but she’d put on a few pounds, there were streaks of silver in her dark hair, and she was wearing bifocals. “You don’t happen to know what’s got him all fired up this morning, do you?” she asked me.

“No clue.”

“He started cussing, then he laughed a little, then he started cussing again. Said he fucking knew it, said that son of a bitch, then threw something, it sounded like. All I want to know is if somebody’s gonna get fired. If that’s the case, I’m taking a sick day. I can’t deal with confrontation.”

“Says the woman who threw a pot at the meat delivery man last winter.”

“That was different. That four-oh-four son of a bitch tried to caress my butt.”

“A four-oh-four with good taste,” I remarked, and when she gave me the stinkeye: “Just sayin.”

“Huh. Last few minutes it’s been all quiet in there. I hope he didn’t give himself a heart attack.”

“Maybe it was something he saw on TV. Or read in the paper?”

“TV went off fifteen minutes after I came in, and as for the Camera and the Post, he stopped takin em two months ago. Says he gets everything from the Internet. I tell him, ‘Hugh, all that Internet news is written by boys not old enough to shave and girls hardly out of their training bras. It’s not to be trusted.’ He thinks I’m just a clueless old lady. He doesn’t say it, but I can see it in his eyes. Like I don’t have a daughter who’s taking computer courses at CU. Bree’s the one who told me not to trust that bloggish crap. Go on, now. But if he’s sittin in his chair dead of vapor lock, don’t call me to give him CPR.”

She moved away, tall and regal, the gliding walk no different from that of the young woman who had brought the iced tea into Hugh’s office sixteen years before.

I tapped a knuckle on the door. Hugh wasn’t dead, but he was slumped behind his oversize desk, rubbing his temples like a man with a migraine. His laptop was open in front of him.

“Are you going to fire someone?” I asked.

He looked up. “Huh?”

“Georgia says if you’re going to fire someone, she’s taking a sick day.”

“I’m not going to fire anyone. That’s ridiculous.”

“She says you threw something.”

“Bullshit.” He paused. “I did kick the wastebasket when I saw the shit about the holy rings.”

“Tell me about the holy rings. Then I’ll give the wastebasket another ritual kick and go to work. I’ve got sixteen billion things to do today, including learning two tunes for that Gotta Wanna session. A wastebasket field goal might be just the thing to get me jump-started.”

Hugh went back to rubbing his temples. “I thought this might happen, I knew he had it in him, but I never expected anything quite this… this grand. But you know what they say—go big or go home.”

“No fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

“You will, Jamie, you will.”

I parked my butt on the corner of his desk.

“Every morning I watch the six AM news while I do my crunches and pedal the stationary bike, okay? Mostly because watching the weather chick has its own aerobic benefits. And this morning I saw an ad for something besides magic wrinkle creams and Time-Warner golden oldie collections. I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t, fucking, believe it. At the same time I could.” He laughed then, not a this-is-funny laugh but an I-can’t-fucking-believe-it laugh. “So I turn off the idiot box and investigate further on the Internet.”

I started around his desk but he held up a hand to stop me. “First I have to ask you if you’ll go on a man-date with me, Jamie. To see someone who has—after a couple of false starts—finally realized his destiny.”

“Sure, I guess so. As long as it isn’t a Justin Bieber concert. I’m a little long in the tooth for the Bieb.”

“Oh, this is much better than the Bieb. Take a look. Just don’t let it burn your eyes.”

I walked around the desk and met my fifth business for the third time. The first thing I noticed was the hokey hypnotist’s stare. His hands were spread to either side of his face, and he was wearing a thick gold band on the third finger of each.

It was a poster on a website headed PASTOR C. DANNY JACOBS HEALING REVIVAL TOUR 2008.

“Bring hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind; compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Luke 14:21 and 23.

At the bottom was a photo of a boy throwing away his crutches while a congregation stood watching with expressions of joyous awe. The caption below the photo read Robert Rivard, healed of MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY 5/30/07, St. Louis, Mo.

I was stunned, the way a person would be, I suppose, if he caught sight of an old friend who has been reported dead or arrested for committing a serious crime. Yet part of me—the changed part, the healed part—wasn’t surprised. That part of me had been waiting for this all along.

Hugh laughed and said, “Man, you look like a bird flew into your mouth and you swallowed it.” Then he spoke aloud the only coherent thought I had in my brain at that moment. “Looks like the Rev’s up to his old tricks.”

“Yes,” I said, then pointed at the reference to the Book of Matthew. “But that verse isn’t about healing.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I never knew you were a Bible scholar.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” I said, “because we never talk about him. But I knew Charlie Jacobs long before Tulsa. When I was a little boy, he was the minister at our church. It was his first pastoral job, and I would have guessed it was his last. Until now.”

His smile went away. “You’re shitting me! How old was he, eighteen?”

“I think around twenty-five. I was six or seven.”

“Was he healing people back then?”

“Not at all.” Except for my brother Con, that was. “In those days he was straight-up Methodist—you know, Welch’s grape juice at communion instead of wine. Everyone liked him.” At least until the Terrible Sermon. “He quit after he lost his wife and son in a road accident.”

“The Rev was married? He had a kid?”

“Yes.”

Hugh considered. “So he’s actually got a right to at least one of those wedding rings—if they are wedding rings. Which I doubt. Look at this.”

He went to the band at the top of the website page, put the cursor on MIRACLE TESTIMONY, and clicked. The screen now showed a line of YouTube videos. There were at least a dozen.

“Hugh, if you want to go see Charlie Jacobs, I’m happy to tag along, but I really don’t have time to discuss him this morning.”

He regarded me closely. “You don’t look like someone who swallowed a bird. You look like somebody gave you a hard punch to the gut. Look at this one vid, and I’ll let you go.”

Halfway down was the boy from the poster. When Hugh clicked on it, I saw the clip, which was only a little over a minute long, had racked up better than a hundred thousand views. Not quite viral, but close.

When the picture started to move, someone shoved a microphone with KSDK on it into Robert Rivard’s face. An unseen woman said, “Describe what happened when this so-called healing took place, Bobby.”

“Well, ma’am,” Bobby said, “when he grabbed on my head, I could feel the holy wedding rings on the sides, right here.” He indicated his temples. “I heard a snap, like a stick of kin’lin wood. I might have passed out for a second or two. Then this… I don’t know… warmth went down my legs… and…” The boy began to weep. “And I could stand on em. I could walk! I was healed! God bless Pastor Danny!”

Hugh sat back. “I haven’t watched all the other testimonials, but the ones I have watched are pretty much the same. Remind you of anything?”

“Maybe,” I said. Cautiously. “What about you?”

We had never discussed the favor “the Rev” had done for Hugh—a favor big enough to cause the boss of the Wolfjaw Ranch to hire a barely straight heroin addict on the basis of a phone call.

“Not while you’re pressed for time. What are you doing for lunch?”

“Ordering in pizza. After the c&w chick exits, there’s a guy from Longmont… sheet says he’s ‘a baritone interpreter of popular song’…”

Hugh looked blank for a moment, then slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh my God, is it George Damon?”

“Yeah, that’s the name.”

“Christ, I thought that sucker was dead. It’s been years—before your time. The first record he made with us was Damon Does Gershwin. Long before CDs this was, although eight-tracks might have been around. Every song, and I mean every fucking song, sounded like Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America.’ Let Mookie handle him. They go back. If the Mookster screws up, you can fix it in the mix.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. If we’re going to see the Rev’s fine and holy shit-show, I want to hear what you know about him first. Probably we should have had this conversation years ago.”

I thought that over. “Okay… but if you want to get, you have to give. A full and fair exchange of information.”

He laced his hands together on the not inconsiderable middle of his western-style shirt and rocked back in his chair. “It’s nothing I’m ashamed of, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just so… unbelievable.”

“I’ll believe it,” I said.

“Maybe so. Before you leave, tell me what that verse in Matthew says, and how you know it.”

“I can’t quote it exactly after so many years, but it’s something like, ‘As the lightning flashes from east to west, covering the sky, so shall be the coming of Jesus.’ It’s not about healing, it’s about the apocalypse. And I remember it because it was one of Reverend Jacobs’s favorites.”

I glanced at the clock. The long-legged country girl—Mandy something-or-other—was a chronic early bird, she was probably already sitting on the steps outside Studio 1 with her guitar propped up beside her, but there was one thing I had to know right then. “What did you mean when you said you doubted they were wedding rings?”

“Didn’t use the rings on you, huh? When he took care of your little drug problem?”

I thought of the abandoned auto body shop. “Nope. Headphones.”

“This was in what? 1992?”

“Yes.”

“My experience with the Rev was in 1983. He must have updated his MO in the time between. He probably went back to the rings because they seem more religious than headphones. But I bet he’s moved ahead with his work since my time… and yours. That’s the Rev, wouldn’t you say? Always trying to take it to the next level?”

“You call him the Rev. Was he preaching when you met him?”

“Yes and no. It’s complicated. Go on, get out of here, your girl will be waiting. Maybe she’ll be wearing a miniskirt. That’ll take your mind off Pastor Danny.”

As a matter of fact, she was wearing a mini, and those legs were definitely spectacular. I hardly noticed them, though, and I couldn’t tell you a thing she sang that day without checking the log. My mind was on Charles Daniel Jacobs, aka the Rev. Now known as Pastor Danny.

Mookie McDonald bore his scolding about the soundboard quietly, head down, nodding, at the end promising he would do better. He would, too. For awhile. Then, a week or two from now, I’d come in and find the board on again in 1, 2, or both. I think the idea of putting people in jail for smoking the rope is ludicrous, but there’s no doubt in my mind that long-term daily use is a recipe for CRS, also known as Can’t Remember Shit.

He brightened up when I told him he’d be recording George Damon. “I always loved that guy!” the Mookster exclaimed. “Everything he sang sounded like—”

“Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America.’ I know. Have a good time.”

There was a pretty little picnic area in a grove of alders behind the big house. Georgia and a couple of the office girls were having their lunch there. Hugh led me to a table well away from theirs and took a couple of wrapped sandwiches and two cans of Dr Pepper from his capacious manpurse. “Got chicken salad and tuna salad from Tubby’s. You choose.”

I chose tuna. We ate in silence for awhile, there in the shadow of the big mountains, and then Hugh said, “I also used to play rhythm, you know, and I was quite a bit better than you.”

“Many are.”

“At the end of my career I was in a band out of Michigan called Johnson Cats.”

“From the seventies? The guys who wore those Army shirts and sounded like the Eagles?”

“It was actually the early eighties when we broke through, but yeah, that was us. Had four hit singles, all off the first album. And do you want to know what got that album noticed in the first place? The title and the jacket, both my idea. It was called Your Uncle Jack Plays All the Monster Hits, and it had my very own Uncle Jack Yates on the cover, sitting in his living room and strumming his ukulele. Inside, lots of heaviness and monster fuzz-tone. No wonder it didn’t win Best Album at the Grammys. That was the era of Toto. Fucking ‘Africa,’ what a piece of crap that was.”

He brooded.

“Anyway, I was in the Cats, had been for two years, and that’s me on the breakout record. Played the first two tour dates, then got let go.”

“Why?” Thinking, It must have been drugs. Back then it always was. But he surprised me.

“I went deaf.”

The Johnson Cats tour started in Bloomington—Circus One—then moved on to the Congress Theater in Oak Park. Small venues, warmup gigs with local ax-whackers to open. Then to Detroit, where the big stuff was scheduled to start: thirty cities, with Johnson Cats as the opening act for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Arena rock, the real deal. What you dream of.

The ringing in Hugh’s ears started in Bloomington. At first he dismissed it as just part of the price you paid when you sold your soul for rock and roll—what self-respecting player didn’t suffer tinnitus from time to time? Look at Pete Townshend. Eric Clapton, Neil Young. Then, in Oak Park, the vertigo and nausea started. Halfway through their set, Hugh reeled offstage and hurled into a bucket filled with sand.

“I still remember the sign on the post above it,” he told me. “USE FOR SMALL FIRES ONLY.”

He finished the gig—somehow—took his bows, and reeled offstage.

“What’s wrong with you?” Felix Granby asked. He was the lead guitarist and lead vocalist, which meant to the public at large—the portion of it that rocked, at least—he was Johnson Cats. “Are you drunk?”

“Stomach flu,” Hugh said. “It’s getting better.”

He thought it was true; with the amps off, the tinnitus did seem to be ebbing. But the next morning it was back, and other than the hellish ringing, he could hear almost nothing.

Two members of Johnson Cats fully grasped looming disaster: Felix Granby and Hugh himself. Only three days ahead was the Silverdome, in Pontiac. Capacity ninety thousand. With Detroit favorite Bob Seger headlining, it would be almost full. The JC was on the cusp of fame, and in rock and roll, such chances rarely come around a second time. So Felix Granby had done to Hugh what Kelly Van Dorn of White Lightning had done to me.

“I bore him no grudge,” Hugh said. “If our positions had been reversed, I might have done the same. He hired a session player out of L’Amour Studio in Detroit, and it was that guy who went onstage with them that night at the Dome.”

Granby did the firing in person, not by talking but by writing notes and holding them up for Hugh to read. He pointed out that while the other members of the JC came from middle-class families, Hugh was from real money. He could fly back to Colorado in a comfy seat at the front of the plane, and consult all the best doctors. Granby’s last note, written in capital letters, read: U WILL BE BACK WITH US BEFORE U KNOW IT.

“As if,” Hugh said as we sat in the shade, eating our sandwiches from Tubby’s.

“You still miss it, don’t you?” I asked.

“No.” Long pause. “Yes.”

He did not go back to Colorado.

“If I had’ve, I sure wouldn’t have flown. I had an idea my head might explode once we got above twenty thousand feet. Besides, home wasn’t what I wanted. All I wanted to do was lick my wounds, which were still bleeding, and Detroit was as good a lickin place as any. That’s the story I told myself, anyway.”

The symptoms did not abate: vertigo, nausea ranging from moderate to severe, and always that hellish ringing, sometimes soft, sometimes so loud he thought his head would split open. On occasion all these symptoms would draw back like a tide going out, and then he would sleep for ten or even twelve hours at a stretch.

Although he could have afforded better, he was living in a fleabag hotel on Grand Avenue. For two weeks he put off going to a doctor, terrified that he would be told he had a malignant and inoperable brain tumor. When he finally did force himself into a doc-in-the-box on Inkster Road, a Hindu medic who looked about seventeen listened, nodded, did a few tests, and urged Hugh to check himself into a hospital for more tests, plus experimental antinausea medications he himself could not prescribe, so sorry.

Instead of going to the hospital, Hugh began taking long and pointless safaris (when the vertigo permitted it, that was) up and down the fabled stretch of Detroit road known as 8-Mile. One day he passed a storefront with radios, guitars, record players, tape decks, amplifiers, and TVs in the dusty window. According to the sign, this was Jacobs New & Used Electronics… although to Hugh Yates, most of it looked beat to shit and none of it looked new.

“I can’t tell you exactly why I went in. Maybe it was some creeped-out nostalgia for all that audio candy. Maybe it was self-flagellation. Maybe I just thought the place would be air-conditioned, and I could get out of the heat—boy, was I ever wrong about that. Or maybe it was the sign over the door.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

Hugh smiled at me. “You Can Trust the Rev.”

He was the only customer. The shelves were packed with equipment a lot more exotic than the wares in the window. Some stuff he knew: meters, oscilloscopes, voltometers and voltage regulators, amplitude regulators, rectifiers, power inverters. Other stuff he didn’t recognize. Electric cords snaked across the floor and wires were strung everywhere.

The proprietor came out through a door framed in blinking Christmas lights (“Probably a bell jingled when I came in, but I sure didn’t hear it,” Hugh said). My old fifth business was dressed in faded jeans and a plain white shirt buttoned to the collar. His mouth moved in Hello and something that might have been Can I help you. Hugh tipped him a wave, shook his head, and browsed along the shelves. He picked up a Stratocaster and gave it a strum, wondering if it was in tune.

Jacobs watched him with interest but no detectable concern, although Hugh’s rock-dog ’do now hung in unwashed clumps to his shoulders and his clothes were equally dirty. After five minutes or so, just as he was losing interest and getting ready to walk back to the fleabag where he now hung his hat, the vertigo hit. He reeled, putting out one hand and knocking over a disassembled stereo speaker. He almost recovered, but he hadn’t been eating much, and the world turned gray. Before he hit the shop’s dusty wooden floor, it had turned black. It was my story all over again. Only the location was different.

When he woke up, he was in Jacobs’s office with a cold cloth on his forehead. Hugh apologized and said he would pay for anything he might have broken. Jacobs drew back, blinking in surprise. This was a reaction Hugh had seen often in the last weeks.

“Sorry if I’m talking too loud,” Hugh said. “I can’t hear myself. I’m deaf.”

Jacobs rummaged a notepad from the top drawer of his cluttered desk (I could imagine that desk, littered with snips of wire and batteries). He jotted and held the pad up.

Recent? I saw you w/ guitar.

“Recent,” Hugh agreed. “I have something called Ménière’s disease. I’m a musician.” He considered that and laughed… soundlessly to his own ears, although Jacobs responded with a smile. “Used to be, anyhow.”

Jacobs turned a page in his notebook, wrote briefly, and held it up: If it’s Menière’s, I might be able to do something for you.

“Obviously he did,” I said.

Lunch hour was over; the girls had gone back inside. There was stuff I could be doing—plenty—but I had no intention of leaving until I heard the rest of Hugh’s story.

“We sat in his office for a long time—conversation’s slow when one person has to write his side of it. I asked him how he thought he could help me. He wrote that just lately he’d been experimenting with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, TENS for short. He said the idea of using electricity to stimulate damaged nerves went back thousands of years, that it was invented by some old Roman—”

A dusty door far back in my memory opened. “An old Roman named Scribonius. He discovered that if a guy with a bad leg stepped on an electric eel, the pain sometimes went away. And that ‘just lately’ stuff was crap, Hugh. Your Rev was playing around with TENS before it was officially invented.”

He stared at me, eyebrows up.

“Go on,” I said.

“Okay, but we’ll come back to this, right?”

I nodded. “You show me yours, I show you mine. That was the deal. I’ll give you a hint: there’s a fainting spell in my story, too.”

“Well… I told him that Ménière’s disease was a mystery—doctors didn’t know if it had to do with the nerves, or if it was a virus causing a chronic buildup of fluid in the middle ear, or some kind of bacterial thing, or maybe genetic. He wrote, All diseases are electrical in nature. I said that was crazy. He just smiled, turned to a new page in his pad, and wrote for a longer time. Then he handed it across to me. I can’t quote it exactly—it’s been a long time—but I’ll never forget the first sentence: Electricity is the basis of all life.”

That was Jacobs, all right. The line was better than a fingerprint.

“The rest said something like, Take your heart. It runs on microvolts. This current is provided by potassium, an electrolyte. Your body converts potassium into ions—electrically charged particles—and uses them to regulate not just your heart but your brain and EVERYTHING ELSE.

“Those last words were in capitals. He put a circle around them. When I handed his pad back, he drew something on it, very quick, then pointed to my eyes, my ears, my chest, my stomach, and my legs. Then he showed me what he’d drawn. It was a lightning bolt.”

Sure it was.

“Cut to the chase, Hugh.”

“Well…”

Hugh said he’d have to think it over. What he didn’t say (but was certainly thinking) was that he didn’t know Jacobs from Adam; the guy could be one of the crazybirds that flap around every big city.

Jacobs wrote that he understood Hugh’s hesitation, and felt plenty of his own. “I’m going out on a limb to even make the offer. After all, I don’t know you any more than you know me.”

“Is it dangerous?” Hugh asked in a voice that was already losing tone and inflection, becoming robotic.

The Rev shrugged and wrote.

Won’t kid you, there is some risk involved in applying electricity directly through the ears. But LOW VOLTAGE, OK? I’d guess the worst side effect you’d suffer might be peeing your pants.

“This is crazy,” Hugh said. “We’re insane just to be having this discussion.”

The Rev shrugged again, but this time didn’t write. Only looked.

Hugh sat in the office, the cloth (still damp but now warm) clutched in one hand, seriously considering Jacobs’s proposal, and a large part of his mind found serious consideration, even on such short acquaintance, perfectly normal. He was a musician who had gone deaf and been cast aside by a band he’d helped to found, one now on the verge of national success. Other players and at least one great composer—Beethoven—had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn’t where Hugh’s woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.

There was another factor, too. A truth not acknowledged until then, but glimpsed from time to time, as if in the corner of the eye. He had remained in Detroit because he was working up his courage. There were many pawnshops on 8-Mile, and all of them sold barrel-iron. Was what this guy was offering any worse than the muzzle of a thirdhand .38 socked between his teeth and pointing at the roof of his mouth?

In his too-loud robot’s voice, he said, “What the fuck. Go ahead.”

Hugh gazed at the mountains while he told the rest, his right hand stroking his right ear as he spoke. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.

“He put a CLOSED sign in the window, locked the door, and dropped the blinds. Then he sat me down in a kitchen chair by the cash register and put a steel case the size of a footlocker on the counter. Inside it were two metal rings wrapped in what looked like gold mesh. They were about the size of those big dangly earrings Georgia wears when she’s stylin. You know the ones I mean?”

“Sure.”

“There was a rubber widget on the bottom of each, with a wire coming out of it. The wires ran into a control box no bigger than a doorbell. He opened the bottom of the box and showed me what looked like a single triple-A battery. I relaxed. That can’t do much damage, I thought, but I didn’t feel quite so comfortable when he put on rubber gloves—you know, like the kind women wear when they’re washing dishes—and picked up the rings with tongs.”

“I think Charlie’s triple-A batteries are different from the ones you buy in the store,” I said. “A lot more powerful. Didn’t he ever talk to you about the secret electricity?”

“Oh God, many times. It was his hobbyhorse. But that was later, and I never made head or tail of it. I’m not sure he did, either. He’d get a look in his eyes…”

“Puzzled,” I said. “Puzzled, worried, and excited, all at the same time.”

“Yeah, like that. He put the rings against my ears—using the tongs, you know—and then asked me to push the button on the control unit, since his own hands were full. I almost didn’t, but I flashed on the pistols in all those pawnshop windows, and I did it.”

“Then blacked out.” I didn’t ask it as a question, because I was sure of it. But he surprised me.

“There were blackouts, all right, and what I called prismatics, but they came later. Right then there was just an almighty snapping sound in the middle of my head. My legs shot out and my hands went up over my head like a schoolkid who’s just desperate to tell the teacher he knows the right answer.”

That brought back memories.

“Also, there was a taste in my mouth. Like I’d been sucking on pennies. I asked Jacobs if I could have a drink of water, and heard myself asking, and broke into tears. I cried for quite awhile. He held me.” At last Hugh turned from the mountains and looked at me. “After that I would have done anything for him, Jamie. Anything.”

“I know the feeling.”

“When I had control of myself again, he took me back out into the shop and put a pair of Koss headphones on me. He plugged into an FM station and kept turning the music down and asking me if I could hear it. I did until he got all the way to zero, and I could almost swear I even heard it then. He not only brought my hearing back, it was more acute than it had been since I was fourteen, and playing with my first jam-band.”

Hugh asked how he could repay Jacobs. The Rev, only a scruffy guy in need of a haircut and a bath, considered this.

“Tell you what,” he said at last. “There’s little in the way of business here, and some of the people who do wander in are pretty sketchy. I’m going to transport all this stuff to a storage facility on the North Side while I think about what to do next. You could help me.”

“I can do better than that,” Hugh said, still relishing the sound of his own voice. “I’ll rent the storage space myself, and hire a crew to move everything. I don’t look like I can afford it, but I can. Really.”

Jacobs seemed horrified at the idea. “Absolutely not! The goods I have for sale are mostly junk, but my equipment is valuable, and much of it in the back area—my lab—is delicate, as well. Your help would be more than enough repayment. Although first you need to rest a little. And eat. Put on a few pounds. You’ve been through a difficult time. Would you be interested in becoming my assistant, Mr. Yates?”

“If that’s what you want,” Hugh said. “Mr. Jacobs, I still can’t believe you’re talking and I’m hearing you.”

“In a week, you’ll take it for granted,” he said dismissively. “That’s the way it works with miracles. No use railing against it; it’s plain old human nature. But since we have shared a miracle in this overlooked corner of the Motor City, I can’t have you calling me Mr. Jacobs. To you, let me be the Rev.”

“As in Reverend?”

“Exactly,” he said, and grinned. “Reverend Charles D. Jacobs, currently chief prelate in the First Church of Electricity. And I promise not to work you too hard. There’s no hurry; we’ll take our time.”

“I’ll bet you did,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He didn’t want you to buy him a moving crew, and he didn’t want your money. He wanted your time. I think he was studying you. Looking for aftereffects. What did you think?”

“Then? Nothing. I was riding a mighty cloud of joy. If the Rev had asked me to rob First of Detroit, I might have given it a shot. Looking back on it, though, you could be right. There wasn’t much to the work, after all, because when you came right down to it, he had very little to sell. There was more in his back room, but with a big enough U-Haul, we could have moved the whole kit and caboodle off the 8-Mile in two days. But he strung it out over a week.” He considered. “Yeah, okay. He was watching me.”

“Studying. Looking for aftereffects.” I peeked at my watch. I had to be in the studio in fifteen minutes, and if I lingered longer in the picnic area I was going to be late. “Walk with me down to Studio One. Tell me what they were.”

We walked, and Hugh told me about the blackouts that had followed Jacobs’s electrical treatment for deafness. They were brief but frequent in the first couple of days, and there was no actual sense of unconsciousness. He would just find himself in a different place and discover that five minutes had gone by. Or ten. On two occasions it happened while he and Jacobs were loading equipment and secondhand sales goods into an old plumbing-supply panel truck Jacobs had borrowed from someone (maybe from another of his miracle cures, although if that was the case, Hugh never found out—the Rev was closemouthed about such things).

“I asked him what happened during those times, and he said nothing, that we just went on moving stuff and conversing like normal.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I did at the time. Now I don’t know.”

One night, Hugh said—this would have been five or six days post-treatment—he was sitting in his fleabag hotel room’s one chair, reading a book, and suddenly found himself standing in the corner, facing the wall.

“Were you saying anything?” I asked, thinking, Something happened. Something, something, something.

“No,” he said. “But…”

“But what?”

He shook his head at the memory. “I’d taken off my pants, then put my sneakers back on. I was just standing there in my Jockey shorts and Reeboks. Crazy, huh?”

“Muy loco,” I said. “How long did these mini-lapses go on?”

“The second week there were only a couple. By the third week they were gone. But there was something else that lasted longer. Something with my eyes. These… events. The prismatics. I don’t know what else to call them. They happened maybe a dozen times over the next five years. Nothing at all since then.”

We had reached the studio. Mookie was waiting for us, his Broncos gimme cap turned around backward, making him look like the world’s oldest skateboarder. “The band’s in there. They’re practicing.” He lowered his voice. “Dudes, they’re fucking horrible.”

“Tell them we’ll be starting late,” I said. “We’ll give them extra time on the other end to make up for it.”

Mookie looked from Hugh to me and then back to Hugh—taking the emotional temperature. “Hey, nobody’s gonna get fired, are they?”

“Not unless you leave the soundboard on again,” Hugh said. “Now get in there and let the adults talk.”

Mookie saluted and went inside.

Hugh turned back to me. “The prismatics were much weirder than the blackouts. I don’t really know how to describe them. Like the man said, you had to be there.”

“Try.”

“I always knew when it was going to happen. I’d be going along through my day, you know, business as usual, and then my vision would seem to sharpen.”

“Like your hearing after the treatment?”

He shook his head. “No, that was real. My ears are still better now than they were before the Rev’s treatment, and I know a hearing test would prove it, although I’ve never bothered to get one. No, the vision thing was… you know how epileptics can tell a seizure is coming by a tingling in their wrists, or some phantom smell?”

“Precursors.”

“Right. That sense I got of my vision sharpening was a precursor. What happened after was… color.”

“Color.”

“The world filled with reds, blues, and greens at the edges of things. The colors would shift back and forth. It was like looking through a prism, but one that magnified things at the same time it was shattering them into pieces.” He patted his forehead, a gentle gesture of frustration. “That’s as close as I can get. And during the thirty or forty seconds it was happening, it was as if I could almost look through the world, and there was another world right behind it. A realer world.”

He looked at me soberly.

“Those were the prismatics. I’ve never talked about them to anyone until today. They scared the hell out of me.”

“You never even told the Rev?”

“I would’ve, but he was already gone the first time it happened. No big goodbyes, just a note saying he had a business opportunity in Joplin. This was six months or so after the miracle cure, and I was back in here in Nederland. The prismatics… they were beautiful in a way I could never describe, but I hope they never come back. Because if that other world is really there, I don’t want to see it. And if it’s in my mind, I want it to stay there.”

Mookie came out. “They’re hot to go, Jamie. I’ll roll some sound, if you want. I sure can’t fuck it up, because these guys make the Dead Milkmen sound like the Beatles.”

That might be, but they had paid cash for their session. “No, I’ll be right in. Tell them two more minutes.”

He disappeared.

“So,” Hugh said. “You got mine, but I didn’t get yours. And I still want it.”

“I’ve got an hour around nine tonight. I’ll come up to the big house and tell you then. It won’t take long. My story is basically the same as yours: treatment, cure, aftereffects that attenuated, then passed completely.” Not quite true, but I had a session to record.

“No prismatics?”

“Nope. Other stuff. Tourette’s without the swearing, for one thing.” I decided I’d keep the dreams of dead family members to myself, at least for the time being. Maybe they were my glimpses of Hugh’s other world.

“We ought to go see him.” Hugh gripped my arm. “We really ought to.”

“I think you’re right.”

“But no big reunion dinner, okay? I don’t even want to talk to him, just observe.”

“Fine,” I said, and looked down at his hand. “Now let go of me before you leave a bruise. I have to record some music.”

He let go. I went into the studio, and the sound of some local punk band playing leather-jacket-and-safety-pin stuff the Ramones did a lot better back in the ’70s. When I looked back over my shoulder, Hugh was still standing there, looking at the mountains.

The world beyond the world, I thought, then put it out of my mind—or tried to—and went to work.

I didn’t break down and get a laptop of my own for another year, but there was plenty of computing power in Studios 1 and 2—by 2008 we were recording almost everything with Mac programs—and when I got a break around five, I googled C. Danny Jacobs and found thousands of references. Apparently I’d missed quite a lot since “C. Danny” first appeared on the national scene ten years before, but I didn’t blame myself. I’m not much of a TV watcher, my interest in popular culture revolved around music, and my churchgoing days were long over. No wonder I had missed the preacher his Wikipedia entry called “the twenty-first-century Oral Roberts.”

He had no megachurch, but his weekly Hour of Healing Gospel Power was telecast from coast to coast on high cable channels where the buy-in price was low and the return in “love offerings” was presumably high. The shows were taped at his Old-Time Tent Revivals, which crisscrossed most of the country (steering clear of the East Coast, where people were presumably a bit less credulous). In pictures taken over the years, I watched Jacobs grow older and grayer, but the look in his eyes never changed: fanatical and somehow wounded.

A week or so before Hugh and I made our trip to see Jacobs in his native environment, I called Georgia Donlin and asked if I could have her daughter’s number—the one who was studying computers at Colorado University. The daughter’s name was Brianna.

Bree and I had an extremely interesting conversation.